Manning, Hugo

i) Letters to Manning: SAMUEL BECKETT, autograph card signed, to Hugo Manning, (“…I do not expect to write any more poems, long, short, or indifferent…”), 9 June 1967, with autograph envelope; Box-file of letters by poets, writers, critics, composers, and artists, in many cases responding to Manning’s poetry, including letters by Alfred Perles (17 letters and 3 cards, 1960s), the composer Denis Apivor (substantial series), Leonard Woolf (two brief typed letters signed, 1967), E.M. Forster (three autograph notes signed), Ted Hughes, Somerset Maugham, Frederic Prokosch, I.A. Richards, Michael Hamburger, Valerie Eliot, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, and Henry Miller, also a group of 18 letters on occult affairs
ii) Hugo Manning, autograph manuscript fair copy, ‘The Secret Sea’, 76 pages, 1966, in a Rowney sketchbook, with an autograph letter signed to Stanley Eker (1967) loosely inserted; ‘The Dust-robed Dancers’, autograph manuscript fair copy, 2 pages, together with a typescript marked for the printer
iii) Hugo Manning, untitled portrait, oil and coloured ink, framed and glazed (frame size 200 x 150mm), not examined out of frame
iv) 10 signed works by Manning including Dead Season’s Heritage (1942), Buenos Aires (1942) and The Secret Sea (1962)
v) A group of books inscribed to Manning: Michael Hamburger, Twenty Prose Poems of Baudelaire, 1946, inscribed by the translator to Manning; H.D. Thoreau, Life Without Principle, with a preface by Henry Miller, 1946, inscribed by Miller to Manning; Maurico Lasansky, The Nazi Drawings, 1966, inscribed by the artist to Manning with an accompanying typed letter signed

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Hugo Manning (1913-1977) was an Anglo-Jewish poet. Born in London's East End, he became a journalist, emigrated to Argentina in 1939 (where he befriended Borges), returned to Britain in 1942 when he joined the Intelligence Corps and was wounded in North Africa. After the War he joined Reuters and combined his journalism with writing poetry. His deep interests both in literarary modernism and in the spiritual are reflected in his work. "Never known to a wide public, Manning was valued by the few who distinguish between the authentic and the superficial and ephemeral. He was honoured by his peers." (Kathleen Raine, Foreword to Selected Poetry of Hugo Manning, 1997)